Our Picnic | Eats
So, food!
We picked a bunch of recipes we wanted to have at the picnic before we flew up to Newcastle and printed them out. Some of them were too complex to make multiple batches of, so we narrowed it down to the recipes that were the easiest and tastiest. Did I do test runs of all the recipes before we made them for the picnic? ...uh, let's pretend I did! Thankfully they were all delicious! I also made a mega batch of my favourite Vegan Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes. I felt badly that this was the only vegan item we made, but they are super good so I hope that made up for it (sorry to our one vegan guest!).
We did the official getting married part on the Friday with the picnic on the Sunday. We bought all of the ingredients for cooking on Friday night and then drove back to Stroud. I think we may have even started cooking when we got back that night. We saved the receipts from buying the food and our recipe print-outs for our picnic scrapbook. We ate greasy takeaway Indian food on a picnic bench on a dark median strip near the supermarket on the night we got married. I don't know about you, but I find this detail highly amusing. Now, on to the real food!
Some of the pies we made were based on these recipes: Mixed Berry Pie, Mocha Mousse Tart, Sweet Potato Pie (I could eat this one for every meal for the rest of my life!) and some we just winged it including lemon curd pies and apple, pear and berry crumble top pies. Thankfully in line with being good at every single thing ever (physics, gardening, sewing, building, maths, singing, writing, chemistry, etc), my mum is an excellent cook!
My mum bought pretty paper cups and plates (um, $80 worth!) for the little people attending and collected glass bottles for the drinks. I found a big stash of vintage handkerchiefs at the markets in Evandale a few months ago and we made bunting to hang above the food using tiny pegs. The big B&C wooden letters were from Cotton On years ago. All of the crockery belongs to my mum (if you're reading this Mum, I hope you've written it down as my inheritance?).
I almost wish that we had some photos of the food preparation stages but I know that I was a (not very) hot mess and hadn't brushed my hair for a week before the picnic and the place was in a total state. Like I said, having to work so hard for it made the whole day feel like we'd earned it!
A few weeks before the picnic, C and I put together a playlist of songs that meant something to each of us. Thankfully we have very similar taste in music. I designed and printed out a bunch of covers onto card stock and bought a big spool of cds and my sister sat for a whole day burning the discs and taping the cases together. The cds sat on the food table in a vintage flour canister and each guest took a cd to play on the way home. Want a copy for yourself? :)
The 'tables' the food sat on were actually old doors that my mum had in the back shed and that we painted purple and sat on trestles. Now you might think - Cute! What a good idea! How rustic! But it was a total afterthought that we had to resort to after realising that my step father had accidentally cut up the trestle tables we were going to use (to make The Moon, which I'll share details of in another post). We got the doors out of the shed on the afternoon of the day before, painted them super quickly and set them up. When I started putting the plates of food out the next morning the paint was still tacky! Desperation breeds resourcefulness!
My mum has an amazing collection of vintage crockery. I'm talking a hundred pastel coloured vintage plates and gorgeous tea cups, saucers, bowls, serving platters and the like. This was certainly a weight off my shoulders in terms of finding serving ware that I liked.
The cake was made by C's brother's lovely wife Melissa. It was so adorable. I'm sad I only got one slice! It was her first foray into wedding cake baking and I think she did an amazing job. Cat cake toppers with intertwining tails - I think she knows me better than I know myself!
I asked my little sister to make cake pops for the occasion. She had never made them before and she trialled a batch a few days before the picnic and seemed traumatised by the experience. Thankfully she made another batch for us and they were really awesome - I think she's found her new calling. They were the first item on the food table to be completely gobbled up (by the children of course).
I also made a batch of about 200 frittata tarts a few days before the picnic. We make these at home all the time and they are super cheap and easy to make and keep for a couple of days in the fridge. These are vegetable, semi-dried tomato and fetta flavoured and the crust is made with pita bread.
C and I were saying as we went through these photos that when we made all of this food we felt like we never wanted to see another pie in our lives but looking at it now I wish I'd sampled everything!
Next post I'll show you some more photos of the location and decor.
All photos by the amazing Justin Aaron Photography.
